May the Silence Break Because you do not speakI know the shockof water encountering a rock. Supremacy of silence is…
Archive
Lifesaving Poems: Yves Bonnefoy’s ‘Let a Place be Made’
Let a Place be Made Let a place be made for the one who draws near,the one who is deprived…
More Chelsea Than Sunderland
More Chelsea Than Sunderlandfor Humphrey PottsYour doctor’s line predicting your survival tickled mewatching Terry lift the trophy before the World…
The Quiet Room
Six years ago today I was told I wasn’t going to die. Those weren’t the words my consultant used, but…
Lifesaving Poems: Chris Southgate’s ‘High Fidelity’
High FidelityThe man sits above the tracksat Bristol Parkway. He drinks tea,studies the distance.He notes the numbers of trains.With the…
In Praise of PGCE Students
PGCE students are so dedicated. They burn with desire to be amazing. They hand in their work and have beautifully…
Lifesaving Poems: Elizabeth Jennings’s ‘A Letter to Peter Levi’
A Letter to Peter LeviReading your poems I am awareof translucencies, of birds hoveringover estuaries, of glass being spun for…
Lifesaving Poems: Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Wet Evening in April’
Wet Evening in AprilThe birds sang in the wet treesAnd as I listened to them it was a hundred years…
Lifesaving Poems: Andy Brown’s ‘Prayer/Why I am Happy to be in the City this Spring’
Prayer/Why I am Happy to be in the City this Springfor creepers etched across a wall like the marble veins…
On hearing the word ‘discharge’ for the first time
I never thought I would actually get to hear the word ‘discharge’ at the haematology unit where I was treated for non-Hodgkin’s…
Lifesaving Poems: On Hugo Williams and Douglas Dunn
I can remember exactly where I was when I first read these poems. It was on the balcony of the…
Kenneth Koch’s Melancholy
To My Heart at the Close of DayAt dusk light you come to batAs George Trakl might put it. How…
Lifesaving Poems: Sharon Olds’s ‘Looking at Them Asleep’
Looking at Them Asleep When I come home late at night and go in to kiss the children,I see my…
Lifesaving Poems: Julia Darling’s ‘Chemotherapy’ vs ‘Psalm 102’
I was astonished to find in an old diary today that by 8 March 2006, less than one month after…
Creativity, Confidence and Challenge: The Write Team Research Report
‘I’ve learnt to be more confident with my ideas, because sometimes you have an idea that you just sort of…
7 things I have learned about cancer
Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of my diagnosis with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (NHL), an aggressive cancer of the lymphatic system. I…
Miracle Fair -by Wislawa Szymborska
This week saw the death of poet and Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szmborska. She was 88. Her compatriot Czeslaw Milosz described…
On waiting to be diagnosed with cancer
Six years ago I began writing the journal which has become my forthcoming memoir of my experience of cancer. It…
Lifesaving Poems 